1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sheet handling device and a sheet handling method.
2. Description of Related Art
As an example of a sheet handling device for handling sheets such as bills, checks and tickets, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-157461 discloses a bill deposit machine. In this bill deposit machine, bills fed into a casing through a deposit port are checked first by a discriminating unit as to whether they are acceptable or not. If two or more bills are recognized as unacceptable, the bills are rejected and discharged in the form of a bunch through a return port. In this bill deposit machine, the rejected bills are sequentially dropped on a stage and stacked into a bunch of bills. However, the bill deposit machine cannot align the edges of the stacked bills. Therefore, if the bunch discharged out of the return port includes a bill of different size and the edges of the bills are not aligned, the user may fail to catch a bill of a shorter length and drop it. Further, the bunch of misaligned bills is not preferable in view of appearance.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2004-149264 discloses a stacking device capable of stacking bills of different sizes into a bunch with the rear edges of the bills being aligned. This stacking device is configured such that the bills are sequentially fed and stacked in approximately rectangular box-shaped stacking space. A stopper which corresponds to the length of the fed bills is provided in the stacking space such that the bills are stacked in the stacking space with their rear edges being in contact with a rear wall of the stacking space. In this stacking device, the state of the stopper has to be changed depending on the length of the bills fed in the stacking space. For changing the state of the stopper, the length of the bills must be detected in advance. If every bill fed in the stacking space has different size, the state of the stopper has to be changed every time when the bill is fed in. This is disadvantageous because the bills cannot be stacked rapidly.
A specification of U.S. Pat. No. 6,273,413 discloses a banking machine including a sheet bunching mechanism including therein a first transport path and a second transport path connected to a middle part of the first transport path. In this sheet handling mechanism, transportation of a bill on the first transport path and transportation of a bill on the second transport path are synchronized such that the bills are stacked at the intersection of the first and second transport paths with their front edges being aligned. For successively stacking a plurality of bills according to this sheet handling mechanism, a bunch of bills has to move back and forth in the first transport path around the intersection. This increases time required to stack the bills. Further, large space is required in a casing because the transport path has to be long enough to move the bills back and forth.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2000-11238 discloses a paper money receiving and paying machine provided with a storage part which winds the paper money. The paper money receiving and paying machine is able to store bills of different sizes one by one and deliver out the stored bills one by one with reliability. However, the machine is not able to stack the bills into a bunch.
Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-293389 discloses a paper money processor including a temporary storage part which winds the paper money. The temporary storage part temporarily stores the bills after the discrimination and delivers out the bills stored therein. Just like the winding storage part described above, the temporary storage part is not able to stack the bills into a bunch. If the temporary storage part and the sheet bunching mechanism are both adopted, the size of the sheet handling device is inevitably increased.